XI

KINGSTON-UPON-THAMES

Kingston-on-Thames is still provincial in appearance, though now the centre of a great growth of modern suburbs. Here we are eleven miles from the Borough, and at the end of the first stage out of London in the old days of the mail-coaches. Modern drags, like the “Rocket” Portsmouth coach of some years back, changed at the “Robin Hood,” in Kingston Vale, but the coachmen of coaching times made longer stages.

The story of Kingston is a great deal too long for me to dwell upon in these pages, which are not intended for a topographical dictionary. I am, indeed, not at all sure but that a book might not be written upon this old town, both to the advantage of the writer and the inhabitants of this truly royal borough; and here is the suggestion, generously offered to any one who wishes a subject!

Kingston-upon-Thames is so explicitly named in order to distinguish it from the many other Kingstonswhich loyalty or snobbery (please to take your choice) has created all over England. There is a Kingston near Portsmouth, and the town of Hull was always known as Kingston-upon-Hull until conveniency and democracy conspired together (much, I should imagine, to the delight of Citizen Carnegie, the Almighty Millionaire and Astounding Autocrat of Homestead) to dock it of two-thirds of its name. But the list of Kingstons is too long for this place, and so you are referred to the “Gazetteer” for the rest, while I proceed to delve amid antiquarian matter in respect of the kings whose coronations took place here.

It seems, then, that before their Saxon majesties had conferred this undying distinction upon the town it was (or what little there was of it) called Moreford, from the ford by which Julius Cæsar and his hosts crossed the Thames; if, indeed, they did not cross at quite a different place, as some antiquaries contend, called Coway Stakes, by Shepperton. When ninth-century Unification prevailed, and the Heptarchy was knocked into a cocked hat, Egbert (only the late Mr. Freeman would have preferred to call him “Ecgbehrt”) held a great council here; but that first great Bretwalda was crowned elsewhere, and the Kingston coronations begin inA.D.900 with Edward the Elder, who sat upon a big stone in the market-place and received his crown amid the acclamations of the people and the confoundedly rough horse-play of the chiefs, who bore him aloft upon a buckler, and (I assure you it was so) tossed him vigorously in the air until the new king became sick and silly, and was devoutlythankful that a Coronation came only once in a lifetime!

SAXON KINGS AND MODERN CYCLISTS

I trouble you with these details merely because the stone upon which these kings received their crowns is still in existence in the market-place, enclosed by and mounted on a modern seven-sided pedestal, upon whose every face is carved the name of one of those Seven Kings, fearfully and wonderfully spelled, to the amazement of the thousands of cyclists who pass by and darkly remember to have heard of Edward the Elder and his successors. When they come and read of Eadweard and similar perversions, they go away, more than ever determined to forget all about the pre-Norman monarchs and to confine their attention to those nineteenth-century bounders, the idols of their little purview—I name the “Makers’ Amateurs.”

But this Anglo-Saxon line of kings, from Edward the Elder to Edmund the Martyr and Ethelred, is a great deal more interesting than the professional cyclist. True, you cannot well lay a wager about Athelstan or Edred, who have been dead a considerable time, something, in fact, a little under a thousand years,—and they never played things low down for “records” or took sordid cheques or shared in “gate-money”; but they are still interesting, and made things so lively in their days that some of their doings have been handed down through ten centuries—andthatis a kind of “record” in itself!

The Saxons managed to defeat the Danes here in some great battle, half mythical, half historic, and the old Shrovetide game of football that used to be indulged in, within the town, is supposed to have been derivedfrom the (certainly unchivalric) way in which the townsfolk of that dim era indulged in the sport of kicking the decapitated head of the Danish leader about their streets.

However that may have been, here was the chosen spot of Saxon coronation, and here stands the stone within a modern iron railing which is fondly believed to be of Saxon character. This stone is supposed to have been one of thirteen, originally forming a Druidical circle, and invested with a sacred character, if not a godlike power. Indeed, the connection between sacred stones and coronation stones is very close, for at one time kings were heirs of the gods, and not only pretended to Divine right, but were actually regarded as themselves divine. People, however, shed this last superstition, and began to disregard sacred stones at a comparatively early date, and the other twelve deities or sacred objects of Kingston soon disappeared, for when the townsfolk set about rebuilding their original wooden houses with more enduring materials, they quickly broke up the gods and built walls of their fragments.

KINGSTON LOYALTY

Kingston has ever been a place of importance, and its castle (than which no other stronghold in England has so utterly passed away and vanished, even its site being a mere matter of conjecture) was several times captured and recaptured by opposing hosts in the Middle Ages. In later times Kingston became celebrated much in the same way as Yankee Boston leaped into fame; for it was here that the first armed force assembled in the Civil War between Charles I. and his Parliament. Colonel Lunsford andother Royalist officers attempted to seize for the King the store of arms in the town, intending to proceed afterwards to Portsmouth, to hold that fortress in the Royal cause. The King was at that time at Hampton Court. But Lunsford’s enterprise failed, for the Parliament got wind of it and speedily arrested him. By a singular coincidence, Kingston was also the scene of one of the last stands of the Royalists, for, in July 1648, a body of some six hundred men was assembled here under the commands of Lord Holland, the second Duke of Buckingham, and his brother, Lord Francis Villiers.

They set out for Carisbrooke, with the object of releasing the King, who was imprisoned there, but a superior force met them at Reigate, and in the last skirmish that followed their retreat to Kingston, Lord Francis Villiers was slain, in a road between the town and Surbiton Common, at a spot long marked by the tree against whose trunk he stood and fought single-handed a hopeless fight against six Roundheads.

“Here,” says Aubrey, the historian of Surrey, “was slain the beautiful Francis Villiers, at an elm in the hedge of the east side of the lane; where, his horse being killed under him, he turned his back to the elm, and fought most valiantly with half-a-dozen. The enemy, coming on the other side of the hedge, pushed off his helmet and killed him, July 7, 1648, about six or seven o’clock in the afternoon. On the elm, cut down in 1680, was cut an ill-shapedVfor Villiers, in memory of him.”

Indeed, Kingston has always been a loyal town, and its people High Tories of a kind that warms my hearttowards them when I think of their bravery. Not resting content with appearing in arms against the Parliament, they petitioned in behalf of their King, thereby incurring considerable danger of being “remembered” in no kindly wise by my lords and commons of Puritan sympathies. Their High Toryism and hatred of modernity have been seen in recent times by their objection to having their Corporation reformed, and even in the persecution of cyclists has their bias been shown; but centuries ago these traits took a much less pleasing shape: the whipping and despiteful using of beggars, the ducking of scolds and the plentiful hangings of petty criminals; although, to be sure, there were some kindly souls in the town, as evidenced by the entries given in the parish registers of alms bestowed instead of scourgings, and we have here no such record of brutality as Godalming registers afford. Kingston, being on a well-worn road and itself a considerable place, was in receipt of much custom from wayfarers of every class, travelling to the sea. Here came sea-salts, men-of-war, personages of the highest station, and Dick, Tom, and ragged Harry. The fine old inns that Kingston boasted afford proof of the amount of custom the town enjoyed. Of these, alas! only the “Castle” is left, and that well-known house, going back to Elizabethan times, is cut up into separate tenements.

The travellers who “put up” here must have made a goodly crowd, and were, doubtless, the source of much prosperity to this ancient borough,

“A praty town, by Tamise ripe.”

MENDICANTS

Another kind of mediæval wayfarers (who took away what others brought) were those who went from place to place, collecting alms for the relief of their distresses. These beggars were “briefed” or authorized by the Ecclesiastical Courts to collect alms and solicit aid at any church they might think fit, even at great distances away from their homes.

Thus the country was, before the passing of the Poor Laws, infested with certificated beggars and tramps who, coming with pitiful tales of robbery, disease, and spoliation, worked upon the charitable feelings of country churchwardens, who listened to the woeful tales of mendicants both native and from over sea, and relieved them with a few pence and a “God be with you,” passing them over to the next parish, where the process would be repeated. The roads leading to and from the sea-board would be particularly favoured by these unfortunates, and the Portsmouth Road, in especial, must have witnessed at times quite a procession of dolorous alms-seekers telling of sad mishaps on land and sea in foreign climes. Some of the items given in this way are recorded in old parish registers and churchwardens’ accounts. Here are some significant extracts from Kingston-upon-Thames records:—

“June 25, 1570. Sonday was her Ihō Jinkin by pattin wchwas robbid on the sea by Spanyards.“February 1571.“10 Sonday was her a man for his Father who was robbed on the Sey by Lycence from my Lord Admirall.”

“June 25, 1570. Sonday was her Ihō Jinkin by pattin wchwas robbid on the sea by Spanyards.

“February 1571.

“10 Sonday was her a man for his Father who was robbed on the Sey by Lycence from my Lord Admirall.”

Here we are not to assume, from the absence of punctuation, that this unfortunate man was robbed bylicence from the Admiral, but that this was a variety of licence from the ecclesiastical kind—a kind of secular recommendation to all and sundry, subscribed by the man’s commanding officer.

“10 Item was here the proctor of Kingsland beside Knightbrig.“24 Sonday was here ij weman the mother and dowghter owte of Ireland she called Elynor Salve to gather upon the deathe of her howsbande a gentlman slayne amongst the wylde Iryshe being Captain of Gallyglasses and gathered xviijd.“May 26 Item her was a man from Dorkinge whose howse was brent.“August 20 Item the proctor of Kingsland was here the Sonday being the 20 of August. In the same day was here ij men being robbid on the Seye.”

“10 Item was here the proctor of Kingsland beside Knightbrig.

“24 Sonday was here ij weman the mother and dowghter owte of Ireland she called Elynor Salve to gather upon the deathe of her howsbande a gentlman slayne amongst the wylde Iryshe being Captain of Gallyglasses and gathered xviijd.

“May 26 Item her was a man from Dorkinge whose howse was brent.

“August 20 Item the proctor of Kingsland was here the Sonday being the 20 of August. In the same day was here ij men being robbid on the Seye.”

This licensed mendicancy was finally suppressed by the Act of Parliament, passed in the thirty-ninth year of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, “For the Suppressing of Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars.” It begins by setting forth in detail all those who were considered to come under these designations. These were:—“Persons calling themselves scholars, going about begging; all idle persons going about in any country either begging or using any subtil craft or unlawful games or plays, or feigning knowledge in physionomy or palmestry; patent-gatherers; common players of interludes, other than players belonging to any Baron of the Realm; juglers, tinkers, pedlers, and petty chapmen; and generally all wandering persons using, loytering, and refusing to work for reasonable wages, or pretending to be Egyptians. These are to be taken, adjudged, and deemed rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars, and on apprehension to be, by appointment of any justice of the peace, &c.,being assisted therein with the advice of the minister and one other of the parish, stripped naked, from the middle upward, and openly whipped until his or her body be bloody; and then sent from parish to parish to his or her last residence, and in default of going there within a time limited, to be eftsoons taken and whipped again.”

This statute was continued and altered in subsequent reigns, and not repealed until the twelfth year of Queen Anne.

There is an entry in Godalming parish registers, on this very road, which shows that this was no disregarded law. On April 26, 1658, the Godalming authorities seem to have inflicted a peculiarly brutal scourging:—

“Here was taken a vagrant”—says this yellow page, stained with time and grotesque with crabbed writing and singular spelling—“one Mary Parker, Widow, with a Child; and she was wipped according to law, about the age of Thirty years, proper of personage; and she was to goo to the place of her birth, that is, in Grauesend in Kent, and she is limitted to iiij days, and to be caried from Tithing to Tything tell she comes to the end of the sdjerney.”

THE ‘GOOD OLD TIMES’

Oh, those “good old times”!

Other singular entries occur at Kingston. In 1570, for instance, we read that, on October 9—

“Thursday at nyght rose a great winde and rayne that the Temps rosse so hye that they myght row wtbottsowte of the Temps a gret waye in to the market place and upon a sodayne.”

Two years later, a new cucking-stool was made at the expense of the parish. It cost £1 3s.4d., and seems to have been freely used. The cucking-stoolwas a contrivance for the punishment of shrewish women who made such ill use of their tongues as to disturb their neighbours as well as their own families. Wherever there happened to be a pond or watercourse in a parish a post was set up in it; across this post was placed a transverse beam turning on a swivel, with a chair at one end of it, in which when the offender was comfortably placed, that end was turned to the water and let down into it as many times as the occasion was supposed to require.

This new cucking-stool had not long been made when it was brought into use, for, as the registers say—

“1572, August. On Tewsday being the xix day of this monthe of August —— Downing wyfe to —— Downinge gravemaker of this parysshe she was sett on a new cukking stolle made of a grett hythe and so browght a bowte the markett place to Temes brydge and ther had iij Duckinges over hed and eres because she was a common scolde and fyghter.”

During the next month the registers give the information that, September 8—

“This day in this towne was kept the Sessions of gayle Delyverye and her was hangyd vj persons and seventeene taken for roges and vagabonds and whippid abowte the market place and brent in the ears.”

I think these extracts are sufficient to give a portraiture of the place in olden times. For the Kingston of that remote date it were well not to seek: it has gone with the snows of yester-year and the fallen leaves of autumns past. There hangs to-day, in the Kingston Public Library, an old drawing by a former Secretary of the Royal Academy, which, although as a drawing it is as bad as may well be, has become, since the old market-place was rebuilt, very valuable as a piece of documentary evidence, showing what Kingston was like in olden times. This is negative praise, but, even so, it is praise to which little of the handiwork of by-past Secretaries of the Royal Academy can attain; for it has ever been the practice of that distinguished body to confer the salaried posts at their disposal upon those of their numerous members who could neither draw nor paint. This old drawing shows dimly what manner of place Kingston was until well on into the last century: the old timbered houses and the projecting signs of the crazy inns making a brave show.

THE RECRUITING SERGEANT.

THE RECRUITING SERGEANT

I should suppose it was at Kingston that John Collett conceived the idea of his picture of “The Recruiting Sergeant,” reproduced here; for the wagon that stands in the road is labelled “Portsmouth Common Stage Waggon,” and the sign of the “Three Jolly Butchers” is clearly a reminiscence of the “Jolly Butchers” at Clattern Bridge.

The recruiting sergeant was a scarcely less familiar figure on the road than the stage-coach a hundred years ago, and a figure, too, that has ever been seized upon by painters and writers alike for sentimental reasons. Has he not been made notorious as “Sergeant Kite,” the unscrupulous ruffian who inveigled the country yokel into drink and the acceptance of the King’s shilling at the roadside inn? Evidently the painter of this picture was a sentimentalist who regarded the recruiting sergeant in the worst light. The composition and the figuresare alike theatrical and conventional. The weeping sweetheart is a figure borrowed from the stage, and so are the two other prominent actors, the Sergeant and the Recruit. The other figures are interesting. In the wagon a fellow is in the act of kissing a girl, while an old woman belabours him about the head. Two children are fearfully feeling the edge of a halberd in the foreground, while a distressed dame—possibly the Recruit’s mother—is being comforted by some women friends.

At Kingston we had better take Mr. Shoolbred’s “New Times” coach to Guildford. That is to say, if we can find a seat; for this popular drive is patronized so extensively that booking is brisk throughout the coaching season. At eleven o’clock punctually, on every week-day forenoon in the heyday of the year, the “New Times” starts from the “Berkeley” Hotel, Piccadilly. The fame of this sole survivor of the Guildford coaches is of no mere mushroom growth, for it is now over twenty years since Mr. Walter Shoolbred first drove his own teams over this road, so that to-day he is become an institution. Time was (and that but a few years since) when a Portsmouth coach was the delight of the road; but Captain Hargreaves’ “Rocket” no longer enlivens the way, and, below Guildford, the Portsmouth Road is unexploited. To-day we fare no farther behind our four-in-hand than Mr. Shoolbred can take us, and he has the route entirely to himself.

ROAD AND RAIL: DITTON MARSH, NIGHT.

DITTON MARSH

It is but rarely that this “well-appointed coach”—to speak after the manner of advertisements—leaves London without a full load or an admiring crowd of onlookers to witness its departure, and you feel yourself (wrongly, it may well be) an essential part of the performance, as, perched on the box-seat beside the driver, you are driven through the thronging traffic of a May morning in Piccadilly. Not until the streets of London are left behind us do the clean-limbed chestnuts of our team have the opportunity of showing their paces; but Kingston Vale is done smartly, and Kingston itself reached at 12.8. Presently we are out upon Ditton Marsh, flat and broad and sombre, and we bowl along here at a fine round pace until we reach the foot of the ascent where, outside a roadside public-house—the “Orleans Arms”—stands ahuge stone post, a century old, carved with the names and distances of many towns and villages, and known as the “White Lady” milestone.

MR. WALTER SHOOLBRED.

Away to the right lies Thames Ditton, beloved of Theodore Hook and a certain “lazy minstrel,” well known to fame in these days, Mr. Ashby Sterry. There also lived at Ditton, during the early part of this present century, that eminent lawyer, Sir Edward Sugden, afterwards Lord St. Leonards, and Lord Chancellor of England. His career was an example of the rise of worth, for he was the son of a hairdresser in Duke Street, Piccadilly, and won his way by the sole aid of his own bright intellect. But, on the other hand, he remains the most dreadful example of the man who draws his own will, and thus gives rise to wasteful litigation with his testamentary incoherencies. He was also the victim of a particularly odious witticism while living here. It shall be recounted, to the perpetual infamy and dishonour of the man who uttered it. Theodore Hook and Croker were on one occasion the guests of Sir Edward Sugden at Boyle Farm. They were admiring a very beautiful vase that stood in the hall, and Sir Edward told them it was a copy of the celebrated Warwick vase. “Yes,” said Croker, “it is extremely handsome; but don’t you think a facsimile of the Barberini vase would have been more appropriate to the place?” I do not remember to have heard if Sugden kicked his unmannerly guest: if he didnot, I regret the omission.

On the way to Esher, up the hillside, the coach passes the entrance-gates of Sandown Park, that most fashionable of race-courses, opened in 1870, and ever since then the “ladies’ race-course”par excellence. Those ornamental iron gates that face the road have a history: they came from Baron Albert Grant’s mansion, Kensington House, that stood where now Kensington Court faces the Gardens and the old Palace.

THE “NEW TIMES” GUILDFORD COACH.

‘ESHER’S STEEP’

At Esher we make our second change, at that old-fashioned hostelry the “Bear,” and are shown those religiously preserved boots worn by the post-boy who drove Philippe Egalité to Claremont in 1848, when escaping “the red fool-fury of the Seine,” then at flood-tide. These are boots indeed, and more resemble the huge jack-boots in which Marlborough’s soldiers won Ramilies and Malplaquet, than nineteenth-century foot-gear. The “Bear” is one of the finest of the old inns that ornament this old road, and its stables, large enough, as the proprietor says, to hold a hundred horses, are a sight to see.

Esher is a pleasant village, prettily rural, with a humble old church behind that old coaching inn the “Bear,” and a newer church, not at all humble, across the way. Nearly all the monuments have been removed to the new building; the most notable among them an elaborate memorial to Richard Drake, Equerry to Queen Elizabeth, and father of the famous Sir Francis Drake, who caused it to be placed in the old church. Some minor literary lights, too, are buried here, among them Samuel Warren, Q.C., Recorder of Hull and Master in Lunacy, who was born in 1807. This literary character and legal luminary (of no great brilliancy, indeed) lived until 1877, when his feeble flicker was finally dowsed indeath. The injunction “de mortuis” is kindly, but I cannot refrain from remarking here that I have seen this shining light of law and letters characterized in print as a “pompous ass.” What else but pompous could he possibly have been after his remarkable training, first for a degree in medicine, and, secondly, for the bar? Such a career as this would be sufficientto turn any man of average intelligence and more than average conceit into a third-rate Johnson—such a man, in fact, as Warren became. Add to these advantages (or disadvantages, you are free to choose your epithet) that of an author successful more by hitting the bull’s-eye of public taste than by intrinsic merit, and you will wonder the less at his self-sufficient mental attitude.

BOOTS AT THE “BEAR.”

THE “BEAR,” ESHER.

PRIGGERY

Warren was the author of such one-time extremely popular works as “Ten Thousand a Year” and the “Diary of a Late Physician”: applauded to the echo in their day—a day that is done. He is additionally famous, however, on another and very different count. His vanity was monumental, and he possessed a prig’s delight in recounting details of the social functions towhich he was used to be invited by the notabilities of his day.

A good anecdote survives of this unpleasing trait in Warren’s character. Let us howk it up again, and send it forth with a new lease of life.

Warren, it would seem, was narrating to Douglas Jerrold,[2]with much oily circumstantiality, the splendid details of one of the dinners to which he had been bidden in the mansions of the great. He constantly referred to the unusual fact of no fish having been served at one of these feasts, and asked Jerrold what explanation he thought could be offered of so strange an omission. The reply was worthy of that wounding and blackguardly wit for which Jerrold was so notorious; a form of ill-natured satire that seems never to have brought him the sound thrashing he so richly deserved.

“Perhaps they ate it all up-stairs,” said he.

And now, before we proceed further along the Portsmouth Road, we must “change here” for Dorking, a coach-route greatly favoured of late years, both by Mr. Rumney’s “Tally-ho” coach, and Mr. E. Brown’s “Perseverance,” by way of a relief from their accustomed haunts, to St. Albans and elsewhere. The “Perseverance” (which, alas! no longer perseveres) left Northumberland Avenue at eleven a.m., and came down the old route until Surbiton was passed, when it turned off by way of Hook and Telegraph Hill, by Prince’s Coverts to Leatherhead, and so into Dorking.

THE “TALLY-HO” HAMPTON COURT AND DORKING COACH.

THE ‘TALLY-HO’

Mr. Rumney’s “Wonder”—bah! what do I say?—Ishouldsay that gentleman’s “Tally-ho” ran to Dorking in 1892, what time the “Perseverance” also ran thither, and a fine seven-and-sixpenny ride it was, there and back. By “there and back” I do not name the route between London and the old Surrey town. Oh no; Mr. Rumney’s was quite an original idea. He gave Londoners the benefit of a country drive throughout, and ran between the sweet rurality of Hampton Court and Dorking. At 11.10 every morning he started from the “Mitre” Hotel, and so, across Hampton Bridge, to Ditton and Claremont, and thence to Dorking, where, at the “White Horse”——

But I anticipate, as the Early Victorian novelists were wont to say. I will quote an account of the journey that appeared in one of the weekly papers at the time, and have the less hesitation in quoting therefrom, because I wrote the article myself, and if a man may not quote himself, who, in Heaven’s name,mayhe quote?

“Every week-day of this spring-time the ‘Tally-ho’ leaves the ‘Mitre,’ at Hampton Court, for Dorking. At eleven o’clock everything is in readiness save the driver, who puts in a staid and majestic appearance on the box only at the last moment. All around are ostlers and stablemen and men who, although they have nothing whatever to do with the coach, and donot even intend to go by it, are yet drawn here to admire the horses and to surreptitiously pat them after the manner of all Englishmen, who, even if they know nought of the noble animal’s ‘points,’ at least love to see good horse-flesh. Vigorous blasts from ‘yards of tin’ arouse alarums and excursions, and bring faces to the hotel-windows, reminding one, together with the gold-laced red coat of the guard, of the true coaching age, so eloquently written of by that mighty historian of the road, C. J. Apperley, whom men called ‘Nimrod.’

“The appointments and the horse-flesh that go to make a first-rate modern turn-out are luxurious beyond anything that ‘Nimrod’ could have seen, splendid as were some of the crack coaches of his day. Were he here now, he could but acknowledge our superiority in this respect; but we can imagine his critical faculties centred upon what he would have called the ‘tooling’ of the drag, and his disappointment, not in the workmanship of the driver, but in the excellence of the highways of to-day, which give a coachman no opportunities of showing how resourceful he could be with his wrist, nor how scientific with his ‘springing’ of his team. Let us compassionate the critic whose well-trained faculties are thus wasted!

MICKLEHAM CHURCH.

TO DORKING

“But it is full time we were off. A final flourish of the horn, and away we go, our coach making for the heart of Surrey. ‘Southward o’er Surrey’s pleasant hills,’ as Tom Ingoldsby says, we go, to Leatherhead, beside Drayton’s ‘mousling Mole’; and so, with a clatter and a cheery rattle of the harness, past Mickleham, with its wayside church, and Juniper Hall, red-faced, green-shuttered; perched above the roadside, redolent of memories of the French refugees,—of whom M. D’Arblay, the husband of Fanny Burney, was one,—and still wearing a fine and most unmistakable eighteenth-century air, even though, as we pass, an equally undoubted nineteenth-century telegraph-boy comes walking, with the leisurely airpeculiar to telegraph-boys, out of its carriage-drive into the road.

BURFORD BRIDGE.

THE “WHITE HORSE,” DORKING.

“Now we are nearing our journey’s end. The glorious woodlands of Norbury Park—that old-time resort of literary ladies and gaping gentlemen, who stapped their vitals and protested monstrously that the productions of those blue-stockings were designed for immortality, long before the modern woman was thought possible—the woods of Norbury come in view, and the great swelling side of Box Hill rises in front, with the Burford Bridge Hotel beneath, shaded by lofty trees which take their nourishment from the Mole, bridged here by a substantial brick-and-stone structure that gives that hostelry its name.

The Road to Dorking.

BURFORD BRIDGE

“No more pleasant week-end resort than the Burford Bridge Hotel—‘providing always,’ as the lawyers might say, that you do not make your week-end coincide with one of Sir John Lubbock’s popular carnivals. Then——! But enough, enough. Hie we onwards, casting just one backward glance towards that hotel which was just a decent road-side inn when Keats wrote ‘Endymion’ there, coming in from moonlit walks across Box Hill, inspired to heaven knows what unwritten poesy. Also, the Burford Bridge Hotel has a claim upon the patriotic Englishman, who, thank goodness, is not extinct, although Mr. Grant Allen thinks the generous feeling of patriotism is unfashionable. For here Nelson slept during his last night on English soil. The nextday he embarked from Portsmouth, and—the rest is history!

“Dorking at last! We pull up, with steaming cattle, at the old ‘White Horse,’ where lunch is spread. We speculate upon the theory (one of many) that the real original Weller inhabited here, but come, of course, to no conclusion, where so many learned doctors in Dickens disagree. We adventure down to Castle Mill; yea, even to the picturesque Brockham Bridge below the town, beyond the foot of Box Hill. The town of Dorking stretches out its more modern part in this direction, halting within sight of Castle Mill, whence itsavant-gardeis seen stalking horribly across the meadows. For the rest, Dorking is pleasant enough, though containing little of interest; and the parish church of St. Martin has been rebuilt. Yet the long High Street still contains a few quaint frontages of the seventeenth century, and our halting-place has a curious sign of wrought ironwork. Those who do not pin their faith to the ‘White Horse’ as the original of the ‘Marquis of Granby’ in the ‘Pickwick Papers,’ elect to swear by the ‘Red Lion,’ once owned by a coach-proprietor whomighthave sat for Samivel’s father.

LITERARY LIGHTS

“The town and district have, indeed, many literary associations. Some of these authors are now forgotten, or were never of more than local celebrity; but what generation will that be which forgets old John Evelyn, the diarist and author of ‘Sylva,’ and many other works, who must often have ridden into the town from Wotton House, near by? He was a friend of another congenial worthy, John Aubrey to wit. That amusingly quaint, but not strictly reliable, old chronicler, says of this town:—‘Dorking is celebrated for fowls. The kine hereabout are of a sandy colour; the women, especially those about the hill, have no roses in their cheeks.’ I do not notice that, however true may be his remarks about the fowls.

BROCKHAM BRIDGE.

Castle Mill.

“Defoe, among others, lived here; and Benjamin Disraeli at Deepdene conceived the idea of ‘Coningsby,’ and wrote part of that work under its roof, as may be seen set forth in his dedication. The fame of Madame D’Arblay belongs more correctly to Mickleham. Then there were at Dorking many disciples of the Aikins and Barbaulds, those Clarissas and Laetitias of a pseudo-classic age whose dull witwas as forced as were the turgid sentiments of the eminently proper characters in their writings. Theirs was an age whose manners were as superficial as was the stucco upon the brick walls of their neo-classic mansions and quasi-Greek conventicles; and, for frankness’ sake, I think I prefer our own times, when we have no manners and make no pretensions that way.

“However, time is up. The guard winds his horn up the street, and we take our seats again. The coachman gathers up his reins and shakes squarely down into his seat; the ostlers step back. ‘Good-bye, good-bye,’ and we are off at a quarter-past three on the return journey. We halt our team by the way at a cheerful inn. The air bites shrewdly, and——‘Well, yes; I don’t mind if I do!’ ‘Here’s confusion to the Apostles of the Pump; a health to our driver; prosperity to the “Tally-ho,” and——’ ‘Hurry up, please, gentlemen!’ We take our seats once more with alacrity, and another hour sees us again at Hampton Court.”

To show the manner in which coach accounts were kept in the coaching age, I append a copy of an old statement now in my possession. It is a “sharing account,” and details a month’s takings and expenses in the expiring days of road travel.

Meanwhile we resume our itinerary of the Portsmouth Road where we broke off, at Esher.

COACH ACCOUNTS

Dr.Cr.

LONDON ANDDorkingCOACH.

Account for 4 Weeks, ending the 5th Day ofAugust1837, both inclusive.

At Esher the fallen Cardinal Wolsey lived awhile when Providence frowned upon him—and for Providence in this connection read Henry VIII., who filled that position towards the great prelate, with greatéclatand an altogether overwhelming success. When the king commanded Wolsey to retire hither, the Cardinal lived in the old building of Esher Place, whose only remains are seen at this day in the Gatehouse standing in the damp and watery meadows beside the Mole. He found the place little to his liking, and displayed his sorrows in a letter to Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, wherein he complains of the “moist and corrupt air.” That he was quite in a position to appreciate the dampness of his residence, we may well believe when we read that he was “without beds, sheets, table-cloths, or dishes”; and that he presently “fell sore sick that he was likely to die” creates, under the circumstances, no surprise.

The place of Wolsey’s compulsory retirement was almost completely destroyed when the modern mansion of Esher Place was built, and the chief historic house of Esher is now Claremont.

Claremont is a house of sad memories, destined, so it might seem to the superstitious, to witness a succession of tragedies and sorrows.

Neither the house nor the estate are of any considerable age; the estate originating in a fancy of Sir John Vanbrugh,—that professional architect and amateur dramatist of Queen Anne’s time,—for a suburban retreat. He purchased some land at Esher, between the village and the common, and, foregoing his usual ponderous style of piling up huge masses of stone and brickwork, put up quite a small and unpretentious brick house upon it. Sir John Vanbrugh died in 1726, and posterity seems still in doubt as to whether he excelled in writing comedies or in designing ponderous palaces of the type of Blenheim and Castle Howard. Certainly his writings are as light as his buildings heavy, and though a wit might justly compose an epitaph for him as an architect,

“Lie heavy on him, Earth, for heLaid many a heavy load on thee,”

the application can extend no further.

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